La Perrera
by xrho
Summary: Post Machismo. Hotch comes home ready to be sent to the doghouse.


There was a word lingering on the tip of Aaron Hotchner's tongue as his heavy hands fumbled with the keys to his house. It seemed important that he remember it, though the reason why eluded his tired mind for the moment. Everything was a puzzle these days, something that had to be pieced together and solved, and the clock was always ticking. It didn't matter if the puzzle was a case at work, his wife's veiled emotions, a missing word or the damn lock on his front door; the constant race was wearing him down and he was having trouble keeping up.

"Perrera," Hotch realized, mumbling the word under his breath at the same time the door decided it felt like being unlocked after all. "La perrera," meaning 'doghouse', and in Spanish, no less. He'd asked for the translation on the way down to Mexico, half in jest, half in bitter resignation, and Elle had obliged. At least it wasn't too, too late. Sometimes when he got home it was three or four o'clock in the morning and then he'd be sleeping on the couch, whether or not Haley was mad at him, because he wouldn't want to wake her. Tonight he'd managed to make it home at an unusually decent hour, maybe six-thirty? Six-forty-five?

A glance at his watch revealed the time as twenty past seven and Hotch sighed as he slipped out of his polished black shoes, leaving them lying haphazardly in the entryway. Better a little late than a lot late though, right? And it was always good to be home. Haley floated in from the kitchen with her hair tied back in a pretty knot and her shirt fluttering like butterfly wings on the wind. Hotch could never get over how beautiful his wife was.

"How was your birthday?" she asked, looking a little too pointedly at his briefcase. He offered a small, apologetic smile to her calculating eyes and she sighed in reply, her face softening slightly.

"Hot," he replied, putting the offending object down with a wry smile. "Sorry I had to dash off like that."

Haley shrugged. "Perks of the job. I know." She leaned in for a quick kiss. "I was just eating. I'd offer you some, but I didn't know when you'd be back so I just made enough for me."

"That's okay. I'm not really hungry."

"If you say so. I'm going to go finish up. You go change and then we're going to talk, alright?"

Hotch turned his head away. It seemed like they were always 'going to talk'. They never argued of course, just 'talked'. He was tired of it and, go figure, he was just plain tired. "Haley…"

"Aaron."

"Look-"

"Save it for later. We need to talk, alright?"

Giving in, Hotch nodded and watched his wife's retreat before forgoing the notion of climbing the stairs to their bedroom and dropping himself on the living room couch instead. He'd had a grand total of ten hours sleep in the past three days and he was supposed to have been on vacation for Pete's sake. Sometimes the world's out to get you and sometimes the world's out to get you, he decided, putting his feet up on the couch and letting his head sink into the armrest. Haley would only be a few minutes. Knowing her, she'd made herself half a salad and called it a meal. Almost without his noticing, Hotch's heavy eyelids slipped shut, quasi-blinking, and didn't find their way open again.

Haley finished her small bowl of soup and put the baby to bed before she went to the bedroom in search of her husband. Not surprisingly, he wasn't there. If she had a dollar for every night she entered that bedroom alone…

"Aaron?" she called, her voice ringing in the house as if it were empty. Hell, maybe it was close enough. Even when he was at home, Aaron was becoming more and more the absent husband and absent father that she continuously cautioned him against being. His mind always seemed to be on other things. It was lonely living in a house with a child who didn't know how to talk and a husband who didn't really want to.

"Aaron?" Haley called again, trotting down the stairs. She caught sight of him asleep on the living room couch and sighed. He looked so much like a little twelve-year-old boy when he fell asleep like that, his head lolling to the side and his legs bent loosely at the knee so that they covered two of the couch cushions instead of three, like he was always leaving room for someone to sit at the end.

She walked over and shook his shoulder lightly, whispering his name into his ear. He squinted and turned his head, but didn't wake up, and Haley rolled her eyes, contenting herself with a quick kiss on his forehead before resigning herself to another night alone in a queen sized bed. She could probably make him get up if she tried -it wasn't like Aaron was a heavy sleeper -but he really did look exhausted. There were dark circles under his eyes and vampirish hollows in his cheeks that hadn't been there even a year before.

It wasn't just Hotch who looked like that, of course. Gideon had bags under his eyes that never seemed to go away, Reid's eyes seemed sunken and small in his too-thin face, and Elle's face was so thin that sometimes her puffy eyes seemed downright buggy. Garcia escaped the sleepwalker look under layers and layers of make-up, leaving only Morgan and J.J. seemingly untouched. J.J. didn't work the same hours the rest of the team did, so she was actually able to sleep once in a while and Derek mostly just avoided doing any paperwork or research that wasn't strictly necessary, though recently the strain had been showing on him too. Maybe his dark skin just hid the shadows better. Either way, it didn't much matter, because Haley wasn't looking at the rest of the team. She was looking at her husband and, as exhausted as he seemed to her, she didn't understand the reasons for his exhaustion like the rest of the team did. It didn't seem necessary to her; it seemed more like disinterest or distraction.

Deciding she didn't want to waste the effort it would take to get her husband off the couch and into bed, Haley covered him with a blanket and went to their room by herself to read, wondering if she'd actually get any sleep. Usually she didn't, not when Aaron was out on the couch when he should be in bed with her. It seemed wrong, like she only had so much of his time allotted to her in his busy schedule and she should be making use of it even as she detested the feeling that family was like a chore to her husband, something to be factored into his agenda. The whole set up was as twisted and uncomfortable as her tangled bed sheets. _Their_ tangled bed sheets.

Whatever.

Haley fidgeted, alone in her too-large, empty bed, mulling over her husband, her marriage – life, the universe, and everything, really. There was a lot of everything to mull over and not enough time to do it and sleep besides, apparently. Haley watched, exasperated, as the clock radio on her bedside table skipped from "9:12" to "11:36" to "1:50", all shining brightly in hellish, florescent blue. She realized she'd been staring blankly at the same page in her rather dull novel for over twenty minutes at almost the exact same time she realized that there were noises coming from downstairs.

Brow furrowed in confusion and the beginnings of concern, Haley extricated herself from the mess she'd made of her bed covers and padded on the balls of her feet to the top of the staircase. A soft, incoherent moan of protest rose up from the living room and a sigh of recognition, relief, resignation, and resentment all in one escaped her lips. Even when he was home, Aaron brought his work with him in more ways than one.

Haley turned on the downstairs lights, creeping down to the couch to shake her husband out of whatever nightmare he was caught up in, but jumped back, startled, when he shot bolt upright.

"Haley!"

Her name came out strangled by emotion or revelation or both. His shoulders heaved for a second as he gasped for breath unguardedly, not knowing she was there. Haley felt a pang of concern and sympathy shoot through her that left her lungs aching in tandem with his. Aaron caught himself, going almost rigid as he pulled his body back under his ever-present control, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "God," he whispered harshly to himself and reached up to wipe his cheek with one less-than-steady hand. Haley stood stock still, biting her lip. He hadn't been _crying_ had he? Maybe only one tear, but still-

_If_ he'd been crying, he'd been crying for _her_. Not for some long lost victim of yet another husband-thieving serial killer. Not for that mysterious past of his that he would never talk about, even when he woke her up at night, dreaming about things that had happened twenty-some years before. Just for her.

Clumsily, her husband pushed down the blanket she'd wrapped him in earlier, making as if to stand up. Suddenly worried about what he'd say if he turned around and found her watching him, she ventured a soft "Aaron?"

He started, turning around, still sitting. The look on his face was confusing, carrying something of fear, something of guilt, and something of a young boy's desperate plea for forgiveness. The expression faded when he saw her, but only slightly, not to that horrible poker face he wore so often now. "Hey," he said, "Sorry I woke you up."

"You didn't."

Hotch frowned and looked at his watch. "I couldn't sleep," Haley supplied, walking over to sit down beside him on the couch. He leaned into her, their shoulders pressing together. "You okay?" she asked and he nodded mutely in reply. "What were you dreaming about?"

He shrugged. "You," he said blandly, "Me."

"Aaron," she cautioned, wanting to groan. Was it physically impossible for the two of them to actually express themselves to each other?

"I don't know. It wasn't-" he paused, "_I_ wasn't very nice."

He lifted his head to look at her. "I know I'm not winning any Greatest Husband of the Year awards and I probably deserve a good long stay in la perrera, but-"

"La what?" Haley asked, caught off guard and totally confused.

Hotch gave a small laugh. "La perrera. It means 'the doghouse' in Spanish. It's sort of a long story." Haley gave a soft chuckle of her own and shook her head, amused, but sobering when she saw the little boy look back on his face.

"What's wrong?"

"You know I'd never hurt you, right?" he asked. He really was asking, she realized, like he wasn't sure of the answer.

"Of course you wouldn't," she assured him, not knowing what else to say. Her husband was a lot of things, but he'd always been a good man. "Aaron, you know you wouldn't."

"No," he agreed, offering a small smile, "You wouldn't let me."

Haley smiled back. "Come up to bed," she ordered lightly, "I'd like to get to sleep some time tonight."

"You were waiting for me?"

Haley shrugged. "I just hate it when you sleep on the couch," she said, holding his hand and pulling him up the stairs. "You come in late and I think 'Yay! He's finally come home, you know, to _me_.' And then I here you snoring and I realize 'No. He's finally come home to that ugly couch.' It's not really very good for my ego." She swayed sensuously at her pronouncement before slipping into their bed, clearly demonstrating that her ego was intact.

Hotch just grinned more widely. "I don't snore," he protested.

"Well… not much."

Hotch stripped, flicked off the lights, and followed his wife into bed. The house does not rest upon the ground, he recalled, but upon a woman. Easing back into sleep, he decided that his house's foundation was really pretty steady, despite his doubts. There would be no retreating back out to 'la perrera' again any time soon and, hey, maybe that meant he could afford to forget the damn word after all.


End file.
